The Anglo-Irish Hyphen

In Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) my attention was caught by a passage on "Yeats and Decolonization." Dealing at once with a major poet and a crisis of imperialism, Said was of course always conscious of what he called the "affiliations" of art with "the facts of power," but here and elsewhere he never overlooked the claim of art to have its own laws and supply its peculiar satisfactions. He was fascinated by Kipling's imperialism but admired Kim as "a great document of its historical moment and, too, an aesthetic milestone along the way to midnight, August 15, 1947." That aesthetic force must somehow be recognized and understood even when the primary subject under discussion is the relationship of the author to an imperialist regime. Political questions may well seem more urgent, but the affiliation still runs both ways. The result is an ambivalence that must not be neglected, and Said didn't approve of critics who ignored or tried to avoid it. "In insisting on the integrity of an artistic work, as we must . . ."—so begins one sentence, almost as if that necessity was regrettable at a time when more urgent demands might be made, when a crying need for justice might be thought to excuse a committed writer from aesthetics—"and yet we must." If we knew no more of Edward Said than that he had powerful musical interests, we'd be aware that he would always defend the right of music and all the arts to be studied in themselves as well as in their political contexts. In his Musical Elaborations (1991) he frequently asserts, though with careful qualifications, the individuality, the aesthetic autonomy, of works of art, with music as the prime example and model of these characteristics. However deeply involved in a political cause, the artist, in so far as he or she is entitled to be called that, cannot escape this obligation toward art, even an acknowledgment, however qualified, of its autonomy.

A section of Culture and Imperialism discusses the part of W. B. Yeats in the politics of his time, and in what follows I offer some of my own thoughts on that subject. Yeats was always sure that his vocation was poetry, but he was, perhaps unavoidably, committed to politics. His relationship to the Irish struggle for independence, a struggle that in the course of his life went through many phases, was never simple and could not be told in full without allusion to the involvement of Irish politics in the urgent contemporary problems of British imperialism. Any such allusion would be very complicated and, like almost every aspect of Irish history, endlessly disputed. For the sake of simplicity I'll focus on two moments in his political career: the Insurrection of 1916 and, more briefly, that bizarre flare-up of interest in authoritarian politics that marked the poet's later years and is represented most vividly, or most scandalously, by his posthumous pamphlet On the Boiler.

The politics of the period were such that many in Ireland felt divided loyalties. The Irish artist, as artist, might feel his situation to be so ambiguous that even his consciousness of his own nationality was uncertain or unstable. He might be a double man in his art (Irish but European, a Gael writing English) and also in his politics (a member of a Protestant ruling class in a Catholic community). His hometown might be Dublin but his address could as well be in London—or, to glance at another case, in Zurich, or Trieste. (Yeats's address was for years Woburn Buildings, Euston Road, London, on the fringe of Bloomsbury.) There might well, on occasion, be conflicts of interest.

To be thus conflicted was the fate of the Anglo-Irish. W. B. Yeats's brother, the painter Jack Yeats, was of course Anglo-Irish, but he disliked the description. Like his close friend Samuel Beckett, he even objected to being called an Irish artist. This implies an at least tacit acceptance of empire, along with some contempt for the hyphenated class into which one had been, somewhat reluctantly...